Home Sweet Hell
by Jade Eclipse
Summary: To Sirius, Grimmauld Place was everything he never wanted to be. It represented the Blacks. And his family has a shadow over him that he never escaped.


Home Sweet Hell  
  
Hi. This is mainly a bunch of nonsense. So yeah. Enjoy. And be /nice/. Don't fry me too bad for it. I tried to make Peter human, because I trust the Marauders' judgment in choosing him as a friend. It would be an insult to them if they were friends with a traitor who was too obvious. Uh... Sure... Hate him anyway.  
  
Disclaimer: Not mine.  
  
This is a character analysis of our dear Padfoot. So tada! Here it is. I won't babble anymore. ~~~~  
  
He had hated it there, at Grimmauld Place. It wasn't so much the mansion itself, more what it represented to him. It had been tainted, he felt, by the people who had inhabited it. All the Blacks. Of his family, his mother was probably the least detestable, even with the sharp nails and even sharper tongue.  
  
She, at least, hadn't pretended to be what she wasn't.  
  
His father, on the other hand... His father had had a mask, a mask designed of smiles and dress robes and respectful bowing here and there. He had seemed pleasant, but carried a wand up his meticulously unwrinkled sleeve and kept all the dark curses available clenched behind his straight teeth. He had been one to stay in the shadows. He would watch and wait, eyes glittering, until you slipped up. Then, like a poisonous snake, a /Slytherin/, he would attack. Mr. Black had always wanted to usurp his enemy. What little he had possessed in good intentions he drowned out with cruel finesse. His was a vindictive sort of etiquette.  
  
His brother... Of all the things, he thought back to his brother and wished he could have saved him. They had been friends, at first, he and Regulus. But the younger boy had inherited his father's gentle, slow-acting venom. He remembered that Regulus had been innocent. A child with neat black hair. He had always rumpled up his younger sibling's black hair, the same way he did to Harry later on. It was a fond gesture.  
  
He didn't remember when the crater had opened up between them. It hadn't even been once they had been sorted into opposing houses. It had begun before that. Maybe with his acceptance into Gryffindor, but he felt it had found its roots even after that. Regulus had been so cultured, so held back. If he had only been able to help, maybe... But there was no hope. Regulus had been and always would be a Black, through and through. There were no possibilities of change. All individuality had been wiped from his brother's personality with his mother's words and his father's example. But he would never forgive himself.  
  
The house was them. Everything about it reminded him of it. When they had finally managed the Anamagi spell, he had been delighted to be a dog. Peter had informed him that a dog was loyal.  
  
"Just like you," James had added. Peter coughed.  
  
"Except to your girlfriends."  
  
He had been proud of that. Then, once they had told Remus, the werewolf had said something very different.  
  
"You look like a Grim."  
  
/Grim/mauld Place. Of course. The supreme irony would always catch up to him. He might have been a Gryffindor, but he could never escape his family. Not even when he had left the human world to see it through the eyes of a dog.  
  
They never let him go. Regulus had been a Black, and he himself was a Black. He had run away, gone to live with the Potters. He had tried being a Potter. Disaster followed him when he tried to abandon his roots, and the disaster forced him back to his relatives. The Potters had died, all because he had been foolish. Hit Wizards had chained him up and thrown him into an Azkaban cell.  
  
An Azkaban cell, right next to all his blood relations.  
  
But instead of giving up, he had escaped. And he had tried to be a Potter again. Tried to fill James's shoes for Harry, shoes he had no right to. He had tried to be anything but a Black, anything but what he was. The Order of the Phoenix and Voldemort had forced him back to that /house/.  
  
Then, his family had dealt the final blow. An arch, a ministry, a single curse from one of his dreaded cousins, and they gave him a final torture. He died, still imprisoned. Imprisoned by not only the ministry, but also his family.  
  
Too late, he realized he would always be a Black. No matter what. No matter how fast he ran or how well he hid, they would always catch him. And that time had been the last.  
  
Grimmauld Place had been theirs. They had made it their own. They had spread a black spell across the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the beautiful tapestries. They had let their darkness engulf its very essence. That house would always belong to them, with or without its consent.  
  
In that way, he and the house were very much the same.  
  
Finis 


End file.
